Blog

Tips, Lists, and Clever Headlines: A Recipe for Getting Engagement

There’s no shortage of fitness articles and healthy recipes on the Internet, and no shortage of ideas for what makes a great content strategy that gets you engagement. We learned that the most popular content had characteristics you can use on your website—for any topic you publish about. So this fall, publish more lists with tips, unique news angles, and helpful educational content both in writing and video.

In the past 30 days, some of the top shared/clicked content across our network was on disease prevention and healthy eating. Take a look at a few of the most popular pages:

They all have catchy headlines.

Catchy and descriptive headlines sets the reader’s expectations on what they’ll find on the page. And each of those headlines have a unique twist to them. For example, not only will you get a list of 44 healthy food items, they’re all under $1.

Work on your headlines; use them to hook your audience to click and read more. Of course, we’re not advocating for clickbait headlines; instead we’re telling you to spend more time thinking about how to fully describe your page in a creative way.

They use lists.

Four out of the five examples above have numbers in the titles; they’re lists of some sort (and we know people love reading lists). Heck, we’re doing it here too!

Using lists (versus paragraphs) helps break your ideas out into scannable “chunks” your readers can quickly digest on whatever device they’re on. Short-form content performs well for many audiences across many channels, so lists are a great technique to use to achieve engagement.

They’re either tips or news.

Each of these pages are one of two types: either a list of tips you can use or they’re presenting you with new information. Tips or news. Work that angle into your publishing.

And speaking of publishing, you don’t have to stick to writing. As you’ll see in the examples above, rich media plays a big part in engaging the audience. Try all sorts of formats to presenting your content, and see what resonates best with your visitors.

Bonus Tip!

There’s another pattern we noticed. When looking at the social networks these popular pages were shared on, we saw a pretty significant “other” category.

Although cutting and pasting URLs is usually the most popular way of sharing we see across our network, in this category, “other” is in second place. This category is made up of many different niche sites that share content.

What does this mean for you?

It means that even if you’re not a large publishing site with millions of followers, you can still get your content out there if you publish it right.

Have I convinced you to try formatting your content this week into tip-style or news formats? Let me know how it goes!